Star of the Magi ~ 1 ~

Naomi Sandburg always said that there was a particularly bright star
in the sky the night Blair was born. Naomi being Naomi, the birth
had taken place in an open field 35 miles north of San Francisco.
Naomi had been living in a commune there, and was entirely committed to
organic farming — which she saw as the only sane and human response to the
horrors currently being perpetrated in Vietnam. Tilling the earth
was at least productive, and she was glad, all in all, not to have electricity
when you considered the nightmarish images of blood and death that now
dominated the TV.

She'd been sitting in the commune's main living space — a room full of
battered second-hand furniture, the damp and cracked walls covered by brightly
colored Indian tapestries and psychedelic posters — when she'd gone into
labor. At her request, her friends had dragged her out of the room
and into the field beyond the house.

They'd spread blankets on the ground and asked if she wanted pillows
for her head or hips — but Naomi groaned and shook her head and made it
clear to them that she preferred to squat. Mary-Ann and Rachel squatted
beside her and held her hands tightly as she gritted her teeth and pushed,
and the men tried to help by drumming rhythmically and trying to make a
melody-line out of Naomi's intermittent shrieks. Eventually, as the
warm night wore on, Naomi found herself surrounded by people — some singing,
others dancing; some playing bongos and tambourines and bells and all of
it swimming past her eyes, the bright stars streaking yellow as her eyes
blurred with tears. Pain. Joy. This was it, this was
the whole of life, compressed into these few hours. Compressed into
this agonized ecstasy.

Her head had fallen forward and she'd nearly blacked out when she heard
the sudden, piercing cry of a new voice, a new melody. Counterpoint.
Naomi lifted her head and gasped desperately for air. Around her,
people were standing and staring with wide and awe-struck eyes. Then
she was tilting, being laid down, backwards, onto the blanket. Some
helpful person tucked a pillow behind her head. She was staring dazedly
upward at the black and yellow sky, at the stars, and something was moving
between her bent knees — hands were — something fever-hot sliding out of
her, the afterbirth and —

She turned her head to the side. "Baby — give me my baby," she
said to Mary-Ann. Mary-Ann nodded and turned away, raising her fringe-draped
arms. Naomi raised her head off the pillow; they were wrapping her
baby in a piece of brightly colored cloth. She extended her own arms
as the baby was passed from Leah to Mary-Ann and then to her — and then
she looked down at the baby, her baby, her miracle-wonder child: a boy.
He was red-faced and screaming and streaked with blood and grayish mucus,
and oh my dear Goddess, he was beautiful, all swaddled up in his tie-dyed
t-shirt.

Blair, she thought. She held the baby to her breast.

Her friend Sarah fell to her knees on the blanket beside her, and pushed
her glasses up her nose. She pulled her Tarot cards from their carefully
stitched velvet bag, and Naomi's heart began to beat with excitement.
Sarah was a true seer, a woman of tremendous spiritual power.

Sarah flipped the first card onto the blanket; this card, Naomi
knew, would tell of her son's past, perhaps indicate something about his
past lives. "The Fool," Sarah announced. "The boy is in tune with
the harmonic vibrations of the universe. He is an old soul trying
to grasp a sense of newness." Blair's tiny fists were, Naomi saw
through the blur of her tears, opening and closing, reaching out for something.
"He is loved by the Goddess," Sarah said simply, and turned over the next
card.

"Whoa," Dave breathed.

Naomi quickly stretched her neck out to see. The Star. "The
boy has both intuitive and rational power," Sarah said with satisfaction.
"He will walk in two worlds. Your boy has a gift, Naomi," and Naomi
raised her eyes to the sky and stared at the single, bright star overhead.
She knew that. She was already sure of that.

"Three for three," Sarah murmured, staring down at the last card.
"Three for three with the Major Arcana," and what were the odds of that?

It suddenly seemed to Naomi that divine forces were perhaps a little
too
interested in her son. When Sarah looked up, her eyes did nothing
to assuage Naomi's fears. "The Hanged Man," Sarah said somberly — and
suddenly, Naomi didn't want to believe any of this. This was all
nonsense, some kind of trance-induced hysteria brought on by too much wine
and too much weed. She wanted to wrap her son up tightly and take
him somewhere safe where there were no bongos and no talismans and no magic.
But where was that?

"The Hanged Man," Sarah murmured. "The card of the Dying
God. Your son will sacrifice himself — "

"No." Naomi clutched her son protectively. They were all crowding
around her and staring at Blair with wide, stoned eyes.

" — for the greater good. He will be asked to renounce himself,
or some deep part of himself. But The Hanged Man is also a divine
teacher, who will gain vast spiritual riches by the exchange."

"Serious mojo," Dave said in a hushed, respectful voice.
There were murmurs of agreement from the others, and then the quick, night-splintering
crash of a tambourine.

Bert raised a hand, his bracelets jangling, and carefully drew his thumb
across Blair's forehead. "He will experience sacrifice and transformation."
Crash
went the tambourine.

"He will be ruled by the water," Sarah whispered. "Drowned in
the water. Reborn in the water..." Crash went the tambourine.

"Stop," Naomi moaned. She couldn't keep her eyes open, and the
disjointed world around her had the quality of a nightmare, a fever dream,
a bad trip. "Please, stop..."

She opened her eyes and saw the card representing The Hanged Man.
A twitch of fingers and the card disappeared, vanished into thin air.
Faces crowded around her, faces she didn't recognize. They were strangers,
wizards, magicians. Midwives and witches. Actors and jugglers,
mystics and clowns. Strange and somber faces, gazing down upon the
serious mojo of her child.

Blair, of course, hadn't believed a word of it. Oh, not that he
didn't respect the Tarot, and he'd grown up around enough wizards, midwives,
and clowns that they were as common as construction workers, firemen, and
police officers were in the lives of other kids. Cause these were
the people in his neighborhood. They're the people that you meet,
when you're walking down the street...

But Blair also knew his mother, and he knew that if there hadn't been
a story foretelling the significance of his birth, Naomi would have invented
one. Not that that was a problem, per se; in fact, Blair thought
that was a pretty good working definition of culture: the stuff that nature
doesn't give us, so we make it up ourselves. So Blair tended to regard
the story of his birth — the field, the star, the Tarot reading, the awed
presence of magicians from as far away as La Jolla and Oxnard — as a key
piece of family mythology, and also as Naomi's internal justification for
her particular brand of mothering. She made him wear charmed necklaces,
anointed him with oils, and asked her friends to cast protective spells
over him on a regular basis. Blair accepted this with the same relatively
good grace that other kids displayed when their mothers urged them to make
a wish as they blew out their birthday candles, and one for good luck.
Smile for the picture, sweetie. It was all magic, Blair decided,
and besides, he liked the smell of patchouli.

But that was before Richard Burton, before Sentinels, before Jim Ellison.
That was before the myths had come alive, and the Sentinels had stepped
out of the picture books, and the temples had risen up out of the maps
and towered before him with their crooked stairs and mossy stone walls.
That was before Incacha grabbed him with a bloodstained hand and whispered,
in Jim's voice, He passes over the way of the shaman to you.
This wasn't some crazy story of his mother's, or some cultural myth he'd
read about. This was real, this was happening.
This wasn't family ritual, this was real blood.

Suddenly the story of his birth didn't seem quite so ridiculous — the
field, the star, the presence of the magi. He wanted to ask his mother
to tell him the story again, but he thought she might be suspicious or
freak out. So he turned to books, as usual. The Hanged Man
was number 12 in the Major Arcana, ruled by Neptune, strongly associated
with water. Not the most popular card in the Tarot, and for understandable
reasons — The Hanged Man symbolized sacrifice and helplessness, frustration,
delay, endless waiting. A state of suspension, literal and figurative.
There were also a lot of associations with mystical knowledge.

Not so much a divine teacher, Blair concluded wryly as he slammed the
book shut, as a divine graduate student. Hanged Man sounded a lot
like a guy who was A.B.D.

And so Blair waited for "The Way of The Shaman" to reveal itself, feeling
a little like an idiot and a whole lot relieved when nothing happened.
It was one thing for Jim to be a Sentinel: that was a genetic advantage,
and it had a biological and physiological explanation. But shamanism
was something else entirely — and nobody'd ever gotten "The Way of The Shaman"
passed to them by physical contact, like it was the flu or something.

As time passed and no "Way" revealed itself ("Hey, no Way!" as Blair
would sometimes mutter, and then giggle, usually when he was drunk), Blair
convinced himself that the whole thing was a lot less mystical than it
seemed. Forget his birth myth and The Hanged Man. Incacha had
grabbed his arm and exhorted him, with his dying breath, to stand by Jim,
to help and advise him — because what else was a Shaman, anyway? In
that sense, Blair had been preparing to be Jim's Shaman all his life, studying
what he needed to study: biology, genetics, languages, rituals, myth.
It just so happened (it didn't just happen, his mind whispered,
it
was prophesied. You've been waiting, Hanged Man; now be patient)
that his particular intellectual interests made him an ideal companion
for a man with Jim's particular sensory difficulties.

Nothing mystical about it.

Except he had been wrong, wrong, wrong, really wrong; wrong on
so many counts it was nearly impossible to keep count. Because
this wasn't science, after all — it was magic. And he was part of
the magic; the magic touched him. He was implicated.
The myths had come alive, the Sentinels had stepped out of the picture
books, and earlier that day Blair had seen his dreams come to life in art — in
painting after painting of stone temples and black jaguars and the great,
mystical eye of God.

Blair stood slowly, hands raised, and stared into the muzzle of the
gun.

"I can't leave you alive," Alex Barnes said softly, almost sadly, and
jerked the gun toward the door. Swallowing hard, Blair moved as she
directed him, down the hallway, through the inside door, down the marble
steps, to the outside door. She marched him straight across the Hargrove
lawn, toward the copse of trees on the far side of campus. Blair
glanced to his right and saw the parking lot, his car — he could run for
it! — except she was right behind him and man, that was a mighty big gun.
He didn't much relish being shot in the back, and besides, he was the Hanged
Man — and on his own turf, grad school.

And the Hanged Man, in the Tarot, was always smiling.

So Blair stopped and turned around, hands still raised, and smiled at
her. Alex's eyes narrowed. "What are you doing? I didn't
say stop."

"I know," Blair said. "But I'm stopping." The main lesson
of the Hanged Man is that we win by surrendering. "In fact, I
give up."

"I said, keep going," Alex growled.

Blair felt his smile widening. "You know," he began, "I'm kind
of in a state of suspension. I've been doing the graduate school
thing for a while now, walking on the A.B.D. treadmill — "

Alex's face contorted in rage. "Move."

" — and I think maybe I've got completion issues or something."
It felt good to say it out loud finally. "I mean, why haven't I finished
writing my dissertation?" he asked her. "You'd think I'd be dying
to move on to the next thing — "

"You'll move on," she growled. "You'll move now!"

" — except I'm not. I'm not at all psyched to move. Probably because
of Jim," Blair said thoughtfully, "but you saw Jim, you can connect those
dots for yourself. Jim's the man. Jim's my main man — "

Alex lifted the gun. Blair's voice caught in his throat for a
moment, but he managed to keep himself together and talking. Naomi's
baby boy could always talk.

" — and so I guess I'd rather go around in circles with him than move
on alone." Blair lifted his chin and looked at Alex defiantly, unmovingly.
You have reached The Hanged Man. Please hold. "I'm like — stuck,"
and he could see that she was barely containing her fury at his disobedience.
"Yeah," Blair breathed, helplessly tensing for the shot, "stuck is the
word — "

She fired, and Blair instinctively cringed and ducked, and shit!
the shot was so loud. His heart was pounding so furiously that for
a moment he wasn't sure what had happened — was he hit? He didn't
think so, but he couldn't — quite —

Another blast, another shot, and he actually felt this one whizz past
his ear. He nearly dropped to the ground, except that would make
him a hell of a target — she could just stand over him and fire downwards,
and so he turned to run —

Except she was there, on him, fighting him, and he struggled
with her and felt a sudden crack of pain as something smashed into his
skull. The gun, he thought. She was pistol-whipping him with
the —

The world reeled drunkenly as they staggered together, as he tried to
fight her off. She got another good blow in, a tooth-rattling backhander
that sent him flying out of her arms and stumbling backwards. He
fell down hard against the edge of the Hargrove Fountain, hard enough that
he thought he cracked a rib. He was having trouble finding his center
of gravity; it was like she'd broken a bone in his inner ear, and now he
had a sort of arm-flailing vertigo. He was tugged up by the fabric
of his blue shirt, and he felt another burst of pain in his head — so bright
that he blacked out for a moment.

He came to, suddenly, in the water, which was cold and foul-smelling.
Hands were grasping his shirt, hands were twined deep in his hair, holding
him down. His head was exploding.

And then something in him calmed, and he opened his eyes and saw his
hair floating around him in the water. The world was suffused with
bright blue light, and above him, on the other side of the fountain's mirrored
surface, he could see Alex looming like a shark.

He felt strangely at home, and oddly reassured, even though he could
hear his own heart-beat slowing down. He would drown, but he would
be reborn: this, finally, was the Way of The Shaman. Jim would pull
him out of the water and kiss his cold, cold lips —

Blair smiled as his heart stopped.

When the jaguar smashed into him, the white light was brighter than
any star he'd ever seen.